The case has been building for a third-generation iPad with Retina Display in recent weeks. The latest clue arrives in a Korean Times report about LG Display CEO’s meeting with reporters late yesterday. Asked whether his company would enter the OLED market for smaller portable devices, CEO Kwon Young-soo responded by accusing Samsung of misleading the market because OLED displays “are not suitable in terms of picture quality, response time, energy consumption and contrast ratios for smartphones and tablets”. He said LG Display would make OLED displays for big screen TVs and then dropped this bombshell:
This is the most solid piece of semi-official evidence so far asserting that Apple might incorporate a high-resolution display on iPad 3 which may or may not be marketed as being Retina-capable. A number of media outlets and people in the know, from Daring Fireball’s John Gruber to DigiTimes have been whispering about iPad 3 having a much crisper display with as much as four times the iPad 2’s pixel count. The Korean Times also reported last week that Apple was quality-testing 2048-by-1536 displays from Samsung and LG.
By effectively doubling both horizontal and vertical pixel count of the iPad’s 1024-by-768 display Apple would be able to pixel-double existing iPad apps to fill up the entire 2048-by-1536 pixel resolution display of iPad 3. Putting iPad 3 Retina Display aside for a moment, Kwon Young-soo confirmed his company “may release” a 55-inch OLED TV set sometime in the latter half of next year. If you’re in a market for a new big screen telly for your living room, you may want to hold off your purchase because deep blacks, vivid colors and high brightness provided by OLED technology could mean an order of magnitude better TV experience compared to traditional plasma and LED-backlit LCD-based television sets. And because it needs no backlight to function, OLED would allow for a much thinner and lighter TV.
